e he could
have achieved but little, had he not happened to strike a chord of
feeling to which the English people, trained by this slow and subtle
work of the Lollards, responded quickly and with a vehemence upon which
he had not reckoned. As if by magic, the fabric of Romanism was broken
to pieces in England, monasteries were suppressed and their abbots
hanged, the authority of the Pope was swept away, and there was no
powerful party, like that of the Guises in France to make such sweeping
measures the occasion for civil war. The whole secret of Henry's swift
success lay in the fact that the English people were already more than
half Protestant in temper, and needed only an occasion for declaring
themselves. Hence, as soon as Catholic Henry died, his youthful son
found himself seated on the throne of a Protestant nation. The terrible
but feeble persecution which followed under Mary did much to strengthen
the extreme Protestant sentiment by allying it with the outraged feeling
of national independence. The bloody work of the grand-daughter of
Ferdinand and Isabella, the doting wife of Philip II., was rightly felt
to be Spanish work; and never, perhaps, did England feel such a sense of
relief as on the auspicious day which welcomed to the throne the great
Elizabeth, an Englishwoman in every fibre, and whose mother withal was
the daughter of a plain country gentleman. But the Marian persecution
not only increased the strength of the extreme Protestant sentiment, but
indirectly it supplied it with that Calvinistic theology which was to
make it indomitable. Of the hundreds of ministers and laymen who fled
from England in 1555 and the two following years, a great part found
their way to Geneva, and thus came under the immediate personal
influence of that man of iron who taught the very doctrines for which
their souls were craving, and who was then at the zenith of his power.
[Sidenote: Secret of Henry VIII.'s swift success in his revolt against
Rome] [Sidenote: Effects of the persecution under Mary]

Among all the great benefactors of mankind the figure of Calvin is
perhaps the least attractive. He was, so to speak, the constitutional
lawyer of the Reformation, with vision as clear, with head as cool, with
soul as dry, as any old solicitor in rusty black that ever dwelt in
chambers in Lincoln's Inn. His sternness was that of the judge who
dooms a criminal to the gallows. His theology had much in it that is in
striking harmon